“The Only True and Living Church,” Gospel Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Sources

• “The Only True and Living Church,” Gospel Topics. (opens in a new tab)

Objections & responses

Every church makes some claim to authority; Catholicism claims to be the one true church too. Why single out the LDS claim as uniquely large?

The comparison is fair. The Catholic and Orthodox claims are to continuity with the apostolic church; the LDS claim is that the apostolic church ceased to exist for seventeen centuries and was refounded. The second is a larger historical claim because it requires that every Christian community in that span lacked valid authority and that a nineteenth-century restoration reconnected the chain. Claiming authority is not the problem. A claim of total loss and restoration has to explain the historical record of the intervening centuries in a way the continuity claims do not.

This is the church describing itself. Where is the evidence that the Great Apostasy didn’t happen?

This exhibit is descriptive by design, and the question deserves its own answer. The Christian reply is that the second-century sources (Ignatius, Clement, Justin, Irenaeus) show continuity of teaching on the core doctrines; that Jesus promised the gates of hell would not prevail against his church; and that the specific LDS doctrines said to have been lost (an embodied Father, exaltation, temple ordinances) are absent from the earliest Christian sources rather than present and then suppressed. A total apostasy should have left a trace of what was lost, and the early record shows the opposite.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• The Great Apostasy the Restoration requires did not happen: the earliest Christian sources show continuity on the core doctrines, and the teachings said to have been lost are absent from them rather than suppressed.